The Croning

by Laird Barron

  “It got worse that spring of ’79 and went to complete shit by summer. Jack went from the once a week whippings to kicking his kid’s ass every day. Sickest part? The guy got real careful not to leave marks. He’d rabbit-punch him, squeeze his neck until his eyes bulged, that sort of thing. I wasn’t there to see it, thank God. Frankie told me what happened, made a black comedy of the account. He’d laugh and shrug and say something along the lines of, ‘It’s just T.V., Kurt.’ His laugh had changed, too. It sounded like the bark of a crow.

  “He got mean at the end of our junior year, became savage as a junkyard dog. He stole money from his dad and paid the goons who loitered outside the brick and bar liquor stores on 10th and Browning to buy booze for him. Not beer, either. Nah, he graduated directly to Jim Beam; stashed the bottles under the seat of Mike Shavenko’s car—Shavenko was kind of Frankie’s squire. He drove Frankie to all the backyard beer parties, especially the cross-town mixers where trouble could be found if one was sufficiently determined. They’d get good and scotched, then Frankie would pick a fight—one, two, three guys, didn’t matter to him. He’d take all comers and beat them down. The kid was scrawny, which goes to show viciousness is more important than natural athletic ability during a brawl. He became something of a legend, honestly. Frankie took plenty of licks, but I guess it wasn’t anything compared to what his old man laid on him.

  “Now, it can be told—I gave Frankie a key and let him crash on the couch whenever the scene got too heavy at home. He was there, dead to the world on a few mornings, both eyes blacked like a raccoon’s, and snoring loud enough I thought he’d choke in his sleep. And once, Jesus, Joseph, Mary I found him sprawled on the couch literally covered in blood, so much blood I scarcely recognized him. He looked like he’d been in a car wreck; his face was pancaked with gore, his tee shirt was black and hard as a plaster shell. For a few seconds I figured he was dead—then he started snoring that honking, godawful snore of his. I drove him to the clinic. Turned out he’d been in a hell of fistfight against two college juniors at a bonfire party. Frankie had one of them on the ground and was tattooing his face with a sealed can of Black Label when the second dude tried to kick a field goal with his head—the asshole was wearing hiking boots with studs, too. Frankie finished off the first one, then jumped up and chased the other guy along the beach for half a mile and beat him to a pulp. He was frothing at the mouth; tried to drown the guy until cooler heads prevailed and a bunch of kids dragged them apart. Frankie lost three teeth and needed forty-odd stitches in his scalp. Nasty deal.

  “The whole arrangement was a kind of betrayal of your trust, letting somebody the entire school considered a bad element flop at the house while you were out of town. Believe me, I wasn’t happy about the situation, skewered on the horns of a dilemma. I had to choose between helping my friend and keeping the faith with my parents. It was a tough call. I asked myself what you would do in my shoes, Dad.

  “As it developed, Frankie was a perfect gentleman. He didn’t touch a blessed thing. He even helped me with the yard work a couple of weekends. Looking back, it’s lucky for us his dad didn’t put two and two together and come hunting for Frankie to use as a punching bag. Maybe Jack didn’t give a damn. He was so screwed in the brain by then he’d managed to get fired by the union—which gives you an idea what a colossal mess he’d become to provoke that drastic a move. Last I heard of him was during college—he finally lost his house, and relocated to an Airstream trailer in New Mexico and was living with a prostitute who made her bones, so to speak, under a freeway overpass.

  “While all this drama with Frankie was coming to a boil, I reported to Coolidge’s store every other evening at eight o’clock sharp and worked until midnight. Unless we had deliveries; then Coolidge’s assistant manager, Herb Nolton kept me around until one or two A.M. It wasn’t exactly backbreaking labor. Herb usually stayed in the office and watched the tube, or fell asleep in the comfy leather swivel chair Coolidge referred to as ‘the Captain’s Seat.’

  “I worked with another guy named Ben Wolf. He’d graduated two or three years before and got married to his high school sweetheart. They had a baby, so Ben worked three jobs trying to keep the roof nailed down over their heads. We took long breaks smoking in the alley and talking football. Ben had played running back for the team. Didn’t get bupkus for playing time, although he sure looked fast enough. Nice fellow—he even brought his wife and baby to watch me at the home games later that fall.

  “Then there was the other member of our nightshift fraternity—Doug Reeves. Reeves was way older than us; did piece work for a few local businesses. A jack of all trades type; not an electrician or a plumber, yet he could rewire faulty outlets in a pinch and knew how to sling a monkey wrench. He usually kept to himself and that’s probably because he toted a hip flask. He wore heavy aftershave to disguise the whiskey reek. At least once a night I spotted him ducking behind boxes in the storeroom to take a swig. Poor Reeves couldn’t go fifteen minutes without lighting up, either. Mr. Coolidge forbade us from smoking in the building. Smoke got into the clothes and sleeping bags. He woulda been pissed if he knew Reeves walked around with a cigarette hanging from the corner of his mouth. I imagine he woulda fired Herb for letting it go on. Fortunately, Coolidge didn’t drop in for any surprise inspections. Nelly told me once that her parents fought like cats and dogs. Eventually they just came home, had a few scotches and stumbled off to separate bedrooms. That’s how divorce was done back then, right? Still, their misery was our salvation.

  “Things took a turn for the weird. Reeves started hanging with me and Ben during our smoke breaks in the alley. It seemed odd—he didn’t say anything, didn’t want to join the conversation. He smiled at our jokes in the half-ass way people do when they’re trying to get along and not draw too much attention to themselves. At first it happened once every couple of shifts. By the last three weeks I worked there, Reeves was connected to my or Ben’s hip wherever we went in the store. He slunk around back there, puffing his cigs and slugging booze. Got to the point me and Ben couldn’t even sneak off and leave him. Soon as the coast was clear and we’d tiptoe for the door, I’d hear a paint can or a crescent wrench clatter on the floor and here’d come Reeves like a bat outta hell. In hindsight, that might’ve been the case.

  “Ben’s the one who finally decided to pull him aside and have a man-to-man chat. He planned to set Reeves straight, break it to him as gently as possible that he might want to crawl out of the bottle and get his act together a bit. The stalking routine was getting on our nerves and it better stop, pronto. I remember Ben’s expression about ten minutes later when he came back with Reeves in tow to where I was stocking tennis rackets and baseball bats. Ben asks Reeves to repeat what he said and Reeves shrugs and stares at his feet. Eventually we got him to spill that he’s scared shitless of somebody lurking in the storeroom. ‘The Witch,’ he called this person. Claimed she was tall, spindly, and white as chalk. She wore a dirty dress that dragged the floor. That’s how he noticed her—he saw the hem of her dress disappearing into the shadows from the corner of his eye. He thought it was a hallucination, his wacked version of a pink elephant. Until he saw her in the flesh a few minutes later when he walked by the office and she’s in there leaning over Herb, who’s sleeping, as usual. Reeves shook while relating this yarn. Guy’s teeth were clicking like he was freezing. Allegedly this had gone on for two weeks before we got tired of him grasping after our apron strings, as it were. That’s why he didn’t want to be left alone in the store—once, he turned around and there she was on the other side of a rack, grinning at him with pure evil. He wanted to quit, except he was too in hock at the bar and a month behind in rent. If he left, he’d starve. Or have a heart attack from DTs.

  “We didn’t know what to make of it. Ben took the lead again. He patted the guy on the back and made me cough up twenty bucks so the old-timer could go get hammered Friday night—said it was the least we could do. There went my dinner and movie plans with
Nelly. Irritating thing about dear, sweet Nelly—free as she was with treating her friends, she fully expected me to pay the freight during our liaisons. That girl was a cock tease and all around power-tripper. I’m shocked she didn’t go into politics, what with her gift for manipulation.

  “As it happened, Herb called me Friday morning to say an unexpected shipment of exercise equipment was sitting on the loading dock. Neither Ben nor Reeves were scheduled to work, so he begged me to come in and do the heavy lifting because he’d slipped a disk in his back. Since I was flat broke and dateless, I jumped at the offer, although lugging barbells and cast iron plates wasn’t my first choice for an evening’s recreation. I ran into Nelly at the soda shop. One thing leads to another and pretty soon we’re necking in the back of my—uh, your car, Dad—and I’m not really getting into it because my mind is on the freaky revelations of Doug Reeves. Nelly asked me what’s wrong, so against my better judgment I gave her the whole story. She took it seriously.

  “The store was built in 1916 and the Coolidges took it over in 1950. Nelly leaned close and whispered conspiratorially that she’d heard from a friend of a friend that an employee died in the store during the Roaring Twenties; hanged themselves from one of the railings. Only a ghost could come and go like this figure did. I asked if she’d ever seen anything. Not exactly; nonetheless, she remained convinced something spooky was afoot. She’d been sweet on one of the stock boys a couple of summers back and he’d mentioned the ghost too. Same description of a tall, spindly woman with a wicked grin. That sealed it for her.

  “Right there, in the middle of our preempted make-out session, Nelly’s eyes brightened and she pinched me and said what we needed to do was provoke the spirit into appearing, then perform a ritual to banish it from the property. My jaw dropped. I didn’t quite believe what I’d heard. She worked herself into a lather and nattered on about these two friends of hers, outcast girls who dressed in black and moped around and how they were into all kinds of occult bullshit. One of them had promised to show her how to use a Ouija board and take her to a séance they planned for Halloween. Precursors to Goth chicks, those two. Samantha and Cassie. Nobody liked them, not even the chess nerds, or the stoners, or even the fat kids in band. Nelly was slumming, sampling their ‘quaint’ lifestyle; no doubt so she could mock them to her circle when she grew bored. Once she’d decided to bring her pals to the store, I couldn’t get a word in edgewise.

  “Still bemused by this turn of events, I showed up at Coolidge’s that evening. Herb handed me the keys on his way to his twice a month wild Friday night at the Elks Club; he wore his orange blazer and a bowtie—I can’t adequately express the dizzying effect of that ensemble. From what I understand, Monday mornings he’d skip into the store chipper as a squirrel; the one day he wasn’t sober as an accountant. To this day I’m a little curious what he got up to at those soirees. Maybe he hit the jackpot with one those old flames he’d reminisced about on occasion.

  “After Herb made his getaway, I got busy with the mountain of heavy boxes waiting for me in the receiving area, which was sort of a warehouse attached to the rear of the building. Metal racks went to the roof, jammed with stuff and crowded in tight. It’s by the grace of God nobody ever got clobbered by a loose unit of tile, or an unsecured fridge toppling from the top shelf. We stacked that junk to the rafters, literally.

  “Coolidge inherited an antique forklift when he bought the store, the type with a clutch. Ben usually drove the pallets in and dropped them close to the main display room. No way I was getting on that thing in those tight aisles, so that meant hand-trucking the deliveries inside one or two pieces at a time. No fun, particularly because the place was dark and lifeless the way buildings are when they empty for the day and everything falls quiet—and Coolidge’s Department Store was huge. Remember? You guys used to get camping supplies there. Two floors and half of a third with a crappy escalator and narrow stairs with awful carpeting—lime green!—steering the mobs from women’s clothing to sporting goods and housewares. God, that place was so packed with merchandise only three or four people could stand on queue without doing the bump and grind.

  “I realized this was the first time I’d been alone in the place. It was gloomy in there, but I was leery of lighting the building like a Christmas tree. I contented myself with switching on everything in the storage room, which sorta helped, although the effect left much to be desired—everything turned sickly green and there were plenty of shadows in the deeper stacks. It didn’t do a thing for the main floor which was illuminated by light strips inside the display cases and two or three puny brown bulbs upstairs. Honestly, I glanced over my shoulder every five seconds, sort of expecting to see a Halloween mask of a face leering at me. Every shadow was a menace waiting to pounce.

  “About nine o’clock Nelly banged on the glass of the front door for me to let her and the Gloomy Gus twins inside. The sisters were so pale and sickly they could’ve doubled for ghosts themselves, or walking corpses. They sure as hell stumbled around like mini Boris Karloff clones and communicated in monosyllables. Real charming.

  “Those girls were all business, though. While Nelly stood over them, twitching and frittering, Samantha and Cassie broke out the tools of the occult trade—black and red candles, white chalk and a thick black book bound in faux leather—and meticulously scribed a pentagram, or pentacle, or whatever, and a slew of arcane symbols on the concrete floor near the tool department. Coolidge was a first class cheapskate. When the contractors hired to renovate the store for its grand reopening had gone over budget, leaving unsightly loose ends such as bare sheetrock in the loft and carpet that ended ten feet short of the end of some aisles, he booted them from the premises and called it ‘close enough for government work. Who looks at the floor, anyway?’

  “The circle—as Nelly informed me, tittering in her sudden anxiety at committing black magic rituals in the sanctity of the family business—served as a conduit and symbol of protection. Basically, it was supposed to suck in and trap any evil spirits floating around. I thought they were all effing loons and abandoned them to their fun. Oh, not so fast! I was in the middle of unpacking another pallet of boxes when Nelly rushed over and informed me everybody’s waiting. Waiting for what? I received an answer soon enough after she herded me back to where Sam and Cass had lighted the black candles and were hissing incantations. The tool aisle smelled of bubbling fat and burning hair. One of them had chopped off a hank of their hair, tossed it into a tin bowl and doused it with lighter fluid. Whoosh! Too bad the sprinklers didn’t trigger. That woulda been classic.

  “Meanwhile, the black candles were melting in gloopy puddles. Nelly clung to my arm as the red glow of the makeshift brazier lit the scene. It must’ve looked like something from the cover of a pulp comic. Normally, I’d have enjoyed Nelly Coolidge pressing her heaving bosom against me, but I was transfixed by the sisters rocking on their heels, babbling in tongues, fragments of which definitely referred to Beelzebub and The Prince of Darkness.

  “Cassie looked at me and Nelly; Goth girl’s pupils were dilated to the max. She ordered us to sit Indian style. Of course I said, not no, but hell no. Nelly gave me a look like you wouldn’t believe. Her queen of the realm glare that spoke volumes—it was a I’d never work in this town again warning via telepathy. She brushed her lips against my ear and whispered, Cluck, cluck, cluck! I sat and we all joined clammy hands while Sam called for the ‘restless spirit’ to show itself. Deep down, despite being cold to the scene, in my heart of hearts I wanted to see what happened next. Nelly’s fascination was contagious.

  “This went on until my butt started to ache from the concrete; then Cassie pulled a dagger out of her purse and pricked her finger. It wasn’t actually a dagger, just a cheap replica she’d picked up at a Chinese gift shop. She dribbled blood into the bowl. Sam went next and then Nelly. I said nope, no way, and passed it back to Cassie. She smirked and poked me in the forearm. Dull as a letter opener, but she’d jabbed me hard and I w
as on my feet, cursing like a sailor. She flicked blood droplets from the point of the blade and into the brazier. I’d thought the thing was cold because the hair and powder and God knows what else had burned to ashes. Damned if flames didn’t shoot forth again, two, three feet high. The flames died and I stood there swearing. Nobody else uttered a peep; they stared into the bowl, swaying as if they’d been smoking the reefer.

  “The power died. For a few seconds it was pitch black. The girls screamed. I couldn’t see my hand in front of my face. That freaked me a tad. To top that, the air felt electrified, thick as if a humid fog bank had settled over me. Maybe ten feet up the aisle, someone laughed—just once; high pitched and drawn out, it cut through the caterwauling. Mocking us.

  “The light in the office suddenly kicked in. It flicked on and off, repeatedly, faster and faster in a strobe effect. Between flashes I saw…someone standing in there, watching. Coolidge kept some mannequins in the front window to model the flannel jackets and ladies’ underwear, that whole bit. I convinced myself later that Herb left one of the dummies in there, propped in front of the desk. Another cycle of flashes and it was gone. Now I’m considering joining the scream fest. The phones started ringing. We had seven or eight—one at each till, the office, at a kiosk on each upper level, another in storage—and they all went simultaneously. I covered my ears and decided it was high time to bail. Great minds think alike: the girls almost knocked me over as they scrambled for the exit.

  “We piled onto the sidewalk, stood, gaping into the black pit. The darkness was shot through with the wildly flickering light way in back. It was chilly and lonely. Damp wind swirled up from the bay. There weren’t any cars moving, nobody walking. Just the four of us clinging together and whimpering. A pay phone across the street rang, and a tick later, the one by the old drugstore. I made the ballsiest move of my entire life—I walked over to the door and locked it, and went through the alley and made sure the receiving door was locked too. I wouldn’t have gone inside for a million bucks, but I didn’t want Coolidge to skin me alive if somebody looted the place after we ran away. Which we did.